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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

Lack of releases from OpenAI make me more bullish on them. Clearly they have something big they’re working on, they don’t care about competing with current models

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They still need to catch up to their own announcements, Sora was revealed over 6 months ago with no general availability in sight.

Even more bullish from me, they have something

Releasing powerful, novel models like Sora shortly before a major election is just asking for trouble.

I believe they are restraining themselves in order to stay somewhat in control of the narrative. Donald Trump spewing ever more believable video deep fakes on twitter would backfire in terms of regulation.

Besides, isn't it over the top expensive for a few seconds of video ? Election is a factor but even without it I don't know if there's much of a business plan there, what would they have to charge, $20 / minute? Then how many minutes of experimenting before you get a decent result?

I wonder if it'll be cheaper per frame than the image generators.

They did release GPT-4o (making a whole event out of it) and mini recently so not sure why you think that.

Seems like they don't have anything up their sleeve.

Given how OpenAI has functioned in the last year or so not sure how one can think they have some secret model waiting to be unleashed.

Yeah, but then Claude 3.5 Sonnet came out, so they took the lead.

Tangentially speaking, having no skin in this game, it's extremely fun to watch the model-wars. I kinda wish I started dabbling in that area, rather than being mostly an infrastructure/backend fella. Feels like I would be already way behind though.

The main feature and the main novelty of 4o is native voice integration - was announced 3 months ago and is still not available.

I would argue that the biggest novelty is being able to share your screen or camera feed with the live voice - and there's no announced timeline on that yet at all.

The impressive thing about GPT 4o is how well it performs at most metrics. GPT 3.5 was already very impressive - most other companies are just catching up now. GPT 4o is a huge step above.

GPT-4o replaced GPT-4, not 3.5, so it’s not “a huge step above” it, at least not subjectively. It is much faster though, so at least it’s got that going.

The voice thing is a potential killer feature though, I can’t wait to try it, and to have my kids use it.

To me the voice thing was marketing hype, the utility is being multi-modal. It's a great office/creative/tech assistant.

Correspondingly, would you be bearish if they released many good things often?

No but I would be very bearish about consistent mediocre releases

I mean, consistent mediocre releases is exactly what we have gotten out of OpenAI.

But we know they started training Orion in ~May. We know it takes months to train a frontier model. Lack of release isn't promising or worrying, it's just what one should expect. What is promising is the leaks about the high-quality synthetic data that Orion is training on. And the fact that OpenAI seems to be ahead of all the other labs which are only just now beginning training runs on next-gen models. OpenAI seems to have a lead on compute and on algorithmic innovation. A promising combination if there ever was one.

Does the same bullish logic apply to cold fusion?

Huh? Isn't the more obvious reason for the lack of releases is that... they have nothing to release?

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